UCI Department of History: FACULTY

My interests are wide and many. They coalesce, however, around an abiding pre-occupation: the experience and fate of the African diaspora, especially in the Americas but also Europe. How have Africans born in the Americas fared in different parts of the New World? What can historians and other scholars learn from their experiences? What have been the obstacles to the emancipation of African peoples in the Americas and elsewhere? And how have they attempted over time to deal with those obstacles? These have been the key questions that have kept me busy over the years.

Integral and fundamental components to the experience of African Americans and the African diaspora more generally, have been the ways in which their struggles and aspirations are given intellectual, cultural and ideological expression over time and space. Thus, as my teaching and publications reveal, I am especially interested in intellectual history, and in particular, the political ideologies that were developed and espoused by the oppressed of the diaspora and the African continent itself. Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia is as much a manifestation of this interest as it is about the Caribbean diaspora in the United States. I have written several essays, including, “Being Red and Black in Jim Crow America: On the Ideology and Travails of Afro-America's Socialist Pioneers, 1877-1930,” and “The Wings of Ethiopia: The Caribbean Diaspora and Pan-African Projects – From John Brown Russwurm to George Padmore,” that have addressed further this ideological dimension of the African diaspora. Exploration and analysis of these dimensions of the African diaspora story will be one of the primary focuses of my research and publication program over the next few years. The Caribbean, especially the migration of its peoples and their scattered settlements and global itinerancy, has remained among my key interests. The post-slavery experience and developments in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century have generally framed my work. African American migration and urban settlement, particularly in Harlem and Chicago, have been long-standing interests.

A two-volume study of the political evolution of Claude McKay -- an important, fascinating and generally misunderstood figure in Caribbean and Afro-American letters and politics -- comprises my major project at the moment. I’m also completing a biography of John Brown Russwurm (1799-1851), which will also carry a wide selection of his writings, most of which has never been previously published. The volume traces Russwurm’s life and career in Jamaica, the United States and Liberia, where he settled in 1829 and died some twenty-two years later.